


At your side (tu es mi corazón)

by kittybenzedrine



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Miscarriage, Non-Explicit Sex, Suicidal Thoughts, bisexual sole survivor, only a mention of it tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 16:17:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8168161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittybenzedrine/pseuds/kittybenzedrine
Summary: Charmer is like no one he's ever met before. Deacon and Charmer don't seem to know how to love properly, but dammit, they try.





	

1.

When Charmer and Deacon stop by the Railroad HQ for dead drops, or to run errands, or just to check in to prove they're alive, the other agents ask him about her. What she's really like, what kind of person she is, who she was.

He tells them all sorts of stories. How she took down an entire army of deathclaws with nothing but a rusty pipe pistol and a defective frag. The way she once fed a settlement of thirty with a tato, two carrots, and a few bottles of water. About that one time she sniped three men with the same bullet because it ricocheted. How she was raised by a pack of pre-war animals called armadillos. He tells more tame ones as well.

He tells them about rescuing the kid, Billy Peabody, and embellishes the number of gunners only by a little.

He knows better, though. The stories of her grandeur are all played up, real or not. In all actuality, she's just a hard woman in the wrong place, out of her time with things far out of her control. She does the best she can.

 

 

2.

"I love America, don't get me wrong. But Mexico is my home," she tells him. Her normally gentle accent is harsh, and he can barely understand her. He nods anyways, watching her take another hard drink from her bourbon.

Charmer runs her fingers through her short, buzzed hair, the dark strands falling back into place. She offered him the bottle, and he takes a long drink from it.

"It would have been so much better for me and Pat if we had raised Shaun there. Yeah, maybe we would have died of radiation poisoning because my family is so close to the sea. But at least we would have..." She trails off. "Anyways, Shaun could have done like I did. Learned Spanish and English at the same time, definitely could have spent more time with my family. God, my family. I hadn't seen them in two years, and then the bombs fell."

She looks so sad. He scoots over to her, and presses his shoulder to hers. She takes a few long pulls from the bottle, and tries to pass off her tears as the alcohol burning her throat. He doesn't believe her.

 

 

3.

Her shooting is terrifyingly accurate. She snipes raiders that look like ants even through her scope. The Deliverer clears out an entire super mutant camp, two suiciders included. Somehow, her shitty submachine gun mows down wave after wave of ferals in Jamaica Plain.

"The U.S. military wanted me for a reason," she says in a matter-of-fact voice. "I shot a man who was trying to rob my favorite bakery. It was ruled as vigilante justice, except I didn't have a licenses to carry the gun, and I got arrested because of that. The judge said I could have five years jail time or join the military. I chose option two. I fuckin' blew my superiors away with my skills. Destroyed all of my paper targets, then decimated the training dummies. I moved up fast."

Watching her use her combat shotgun as a sniper rifle and still manage to kill the gunner she was aimed for, he shudders and mentally reaffirms that he never wants to be on the wrong end of the barrel of her gun.

 

 

4.

Deacon can count on both hands the number of times she's seem him without his glasses on. He's not sure whether this time counts, because they can barely see each other at all.

Her breath smells of whiskey when she moans, and he's certain his mouth tastes like it too when he kisses her to silence her. One of Charmer's hands cups the back of his bare thigh while he thrusts into her, her other sliding between the two of them.

"Shhh," Deacon whispers next to her ear, slowing his pace. "Everyone in the Red Rocket is gonna know by morning if you're not quiet."

They're in the Red Rocket itself, and the others in the house she built on the roof, but sound still carries. She lets out a small whimper, but her sounds become quieter after.

He can't lie when he's drunk, so when she asked him earlier if he wanted to keep her company for the night, dressed in only a thin shirt and panties he couldn't say no. Besides, he thinks she sounds irresistible when she's like this, falling apart and slipping back into Spanish.

Beneath him, she lets out a few soft, breathy sounds. He knows those sounds well. He picks up his pace, feeling her tighten around him while she shudders from the force of an orgasm.

 

 

5.

"You know how people think I call myself Sole because I'm the "sole survivor" of the vault?" She asks, pulling a white bottle from her bag. She uncaps it and takes a hard drink. It smells like vodka, and Deacon wonders to himself if she has an alcohol problem. She seems to drink every night.

His mouth is full of mirelurk, so he nods in response. He assumed the same thing, truthfully. He figures that calling herself by both Charmer and Sole, her real name would be harder to figure out.

She scoffs and takes another drink. "It's not. It's my nickname. My name is Soledad, but kids made fun of that when I moved here, to America. Teachers called me Sole to lessen the teasing, but then kids started calling me by it out of respect, or they'd get the sole of my foot to their ass."

The ending sounds fond, but her face is bitter and sad. She takes a few deep swigs from the bottle. Fuck. He hurries to swallow down what's left in his mouth and gets to his feet while brushing crumbs from his clothes.

"It's not a good idea to get drunk out here," he tells her, stretching. The burnt out storefront isn't the safest place in any regards. "Raiders could finally catch us off guard or something. But I know of a place a little ways ahead that we can hole up in for the night, even if it is a bit of a walk. Play games and shit. I think I've got Blast Radius in my bag, and I know you have cards."

She stares at him for a moment, then caps the bottle. "I'll gather our supplies if you put out the fire," she offers

Deacon nods solemnly and unzips his pants. "Turneth thy head, fair maiden. Thoust shall not have to seeith-"

Charmer cuts him off with a laugh. "Shut up and piss on the fire already."

 

 

6.

She looks surprised and a little startled at his question. "What?"

Deacon takes a moment to look around the remains of her old house, wondering what her life was truly like before the bombs fell. What kind of woman she was before the Commonwealth took everything from her. "I've told you about Barbara, y'know. If it's not too much of a sore spot, I'd like to hear about your husband."

He doesn't think it's too much of a sore spot anymore. Barbara taught him how to say "I love you" in seven different languages. Curled together on a bare mattress, sharing each others warmth in the cold Commonwealth nights, he's heard Charmer whisper "Te amo" against his neck enough times that he wonders if she really does mean it, or if it's only because she's drunk.

She hesitates. He can understand why. Just as he's about to tell her she doesn't have to, she answers him.

"... Okay."

 

"Before I joined the army, I met a woman. Marissa was wonderful. Long blonde hair, green eyes, and a smile that could give the sun a run for its money. I married her a month and a day after we met. Her and I had never truly been in love before, but I knew the minute meet her, she was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. Our parents were pissed, hers even more so because I wasn't white. I was only 19, and she was 22. We were too young to know what we were doing, they told us.

"But we were happy. Even after I shot the guy and got shipped out, we were happy. Marissa was going to law school, and I was working my way up the ranks at a terrifying pace. I could pay for her school and apartment, and be happy knowing she was comfortable.

"She sent me a letter at one point, about five years in, telling me we needed to have a talk. Told me she wasn't cheating on me or leaving me, but that it was a conversation best had face to face.

"When I finally came home for a few months, I barely recognized her. Her hair was as short as mine. Her breasts were flat, and her curves were hidden under men's clothes. She told me that she couldn't keep lying to me or herself anymore. She was a man. She had been forcing herself to be a woman for 27 years and just couldn't do it anymore.

"From then on, my dear sweet Marissa became my dear sweet Patrick."

She gives a faint smile. "I hated that I called him "she" the whole story, but I didn't want to give it away.

"Anyhow, once I got out of the army, we started trying for kids. I tried to carry them, but. Five pregnancies ended in miscarriage, and we found out my body wasn't... My uterus was "hostile" as the doctor put it. So we took a few of each of our eggs, had a donor fertilize them, and used a surrogate. There were triples, but two passed. Turns out, the two were from me and there was something wrong with my eggs, too.

"But finally, finally. Shaun was born. Pat was over the moon for us to have a son. He wanted to do all the things with Shaun that he never got to do when he was young."

She goes silent.

"And then the big freeze happened?" Deacon asks.

"Yeah. The big freeze happened." She smiles, wiping away the faint tears that welled up in her eyes.

 

 

7.

She's in full blown hysterics by the time he manages to get everyone out of the Red Rocket. Four days after teleporting to the Institute, she reappeared in Sanctuary. She was a panicked mess, refusing to speak to anyone other than to ask where Deacon was.

He gets her as far as the mouth of her bedroom door before she falls to her knees, wailing in a way that chills Deacon to his core.

"Charmer, Charmer hey. Calm down, pal. Breathe," he tells her, cupping her face with both of his hands. "Soledad, tell me what's wrong."

She places her hands over his. She's shaking. "I'm going to have to kill my son," she chokes out, before curling in on herself and continuing to let out guttural cries.

 

 

8.

It's cold, in her little cabin on Nordhagen beach. The ocean makes everything colder. She shivers against Deacon's bare skin, motioning for him to pass the bottle.

The whiskey warms her insides while his skin warms her outside. The thick blanket over them keeps the warmth from their bare bodies trapped, keeping them comfortable as long as they stay underneath. She shifts, between her thighs still slick from their... Earlier entertainment.

"It's not good for you to drink so much," Deacon tells her. He knows he sounds like a hypocrite, having drank nearly as much as her tonight.

"I know," she says quietly. "But it makes it easier to live."

"It's a faster way to die, though," he points out.

He shudders, and not from the cold, when she tell him "I know."

 

 

9.

Deacon hates water. He doesn't mind like, drinking it or bathing with it. But he hates lakes and ponds and the ocean. It's all full of slimy, irradiated water, and he doesn't see the pleasure in wading around in it.

He sits back in the wooden lounging chair, in nothing but his sunglasses and a pair of swim trunks she managed to find for him. She splashes around in a hot pink bikini that she'd found for herself. She left the bottle of rad-x next to him, and he took some as a precaution earlier

Charmer splashes him from the shallows, dousing him and the pip-boy that she left next to him. He pulled his sunglasses down enough to glare at her, and ignores her happy calls to join her.

The sun invades his closed eyelids even though his glasses. Clouds cover the sun occasionally, giving his poor eyes a break.

He totally _doesn't_ scream when a bucket of water is dumped on him. He bolts upright and off the chair, eyes shooting open. He whips his sunglasses off and wipes the water from his face. Charmer runs towards the water, bucket abandoned. She stands ankle deep, grinning at him. Daring him.

She shrieks with joy and runs as fast as the water will permit as he barrels towards her, trying to get deeper into the water before he can reach her. He launches himself and catches her by the waist. He twists around so that he lands back first into the water, taking her down with him.

 

 

10.

The boy calls her "Mom". His hair is blonde, eyes a bluish green, and skin paler than Deacon's. The boy looks nothing like her. He wonders which features came from Pat, and which from the donor.

She still flinches when he calls her mom, but she seems to be getting into the role even easier as the days pass.

Deacon is no fool. He knows she still faintly resents the synthetic child that her real son built, as a replacement for himself. She sobbed into Deacon's shoulder the first night back in Sanctuary, gripping his shirt like a lifeline.

 

 

_"What will happen to him when I get old and he doesn't?" She whimpers out, fingers tangled into the fabric covering his torso._

_He assures her, quietly and calmly, that someone will always take care of him, until his artificial lifespan finally comes to its end._

_"What if I don't ever love him?"_

_"Then I'll take care of him, if you don't want the Railroad to have him. I always wanted a family, you know? Me and Barb wanted kids, and if we couldn't make them, I was willing to adopt any poor kids that happened upon us. After her, I was terrified at the thought of marrying again, trying to bring children into the world, especially with me being in the Railroad. Now, without the threat of the Institute hanging over us... I'm not as scared to have a family anymore."_

_She sniffles against him, and he tries to get her to smile. "He's still convinced I'm his father anyways. Says you and I act like a mommy and daddy, whatever that means."_

_She lets out a watery scoff. "Bullshit."_

 

 

Shaun butts between the two of them, taking Charmer's left hand. Deacon doesn't try to resist when the child grabs his right hand.

"Where are we going?" Shaun asks, looking between the two of them.

"To check on the water purifier in the creek, _mi amor_. It's not turning out as much water as it should be."

"Why?"

"My guess is that there's a shark in it," Deacon tells him with a straight face.

Shaun's eyes go wide, and both hands grip tighter to the adults. He looks up at his mother expectantly. "A shark?!"

Charmer grins in response. "Maybe. We'll just have to see."

Charmer is like no one he's ever met before. She's a force of nature. A gentle soul with an exterior made of broken glass and sharp edges. The hurricane and the rainbow that follows. Deacon hopes to whatever god is listening that he never has to leave her side.

**Author's Note:**

> like all of my shit, this isn't beta'd, so if you see any mistakes or just want to give general constructive criticism, go for it
> 
> I have [my blog](http://iwillpooponthefloor.tumblr.com) on tumblr, if you'd like to check that out 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
